Real local flavor on display in 'Shutter Island'

Friday

Feb 19, 2010 at 12:01 AMFeb 19, 2010 at 7:15 PM

It’s always great when Bostonians get to see Boston on the big screen. The most recent example was Mel Gibson’s “Edge of Darkness,” in which South Station and residential areas of Roslindale, among other familiar locales, were on recognizable display.

Ed Symkus

It’s always great when Bostonians get to see Boston on the big screen. The most recent example was Mel Gibson’s “Edge of Darkness,” in which South Station and residential areas of Roslindale, among other familiar locales, were on recognizable display.

The same isn’t exactly true of the new Martin Scorsese film, “Shutter Island,” which places federal agents, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, on the creepy but fictional island of the title, supposedly situated on the outer edges of Boston Harbor. Since there’s no such place, there was really nothing to recognize. And through Hollywood magic, most of the film was created far from where the island, if it existed, would have been located.

Yes, some pieces of the film were shot on Peddocks Island, just off the coast of Hull. But scenes in Ashecliffe, the story’s notorious hospital for the criminally insane, were staged at the long-abandoned Medfield State Hospital. A rain-swept hurricane sequence in the Shutter Island woods actually took place at Dedham’s Wilson Mountain Reservation. And exteriors of the hospital’s notorious lighthouse scenes were in East Point, Nahant.

But production designers and location scouts didn’t stop there. A stone cottage in a flashback lakeside scene is in reality the stone cottage on Leach Pond at Borderland State Park in Easton. And a different, much more horrifying flashback, showing the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, was shot at Whittenton Mills in Taunton.

But Boston resident Dennis Lehane, whose novel “Shutter Island,” is the film’s source material, used real memories of a real Boston Harbor island when he was writing the book.

“There was a minimum security mental institution on an island in Boston Harbor, but it was connected by a bridge,” he said. “It was called Long Island, but, you know, that would have been a really crappy title. I don’t think it would have had the same shiver. Like, Long Island, hmmm, Montauk.”

He remembers being brought out to Boston’s Long Island as a kid by his uncle.

“I believe it had stopped being a mental institution in the ’60s, then it was a home for the mentally handicapped, and now I think it’s a drug rehab place,” said Lehane. “He brought us out there during the Blizzard of ’78 and it was really barren, nobody was using it at that point. And he told us that sometimes, usually right about now when the sun was going down, the ghosts of the former patients could be seen in the woods. And then, because it’s my family, he vanished. That was our sense of humor. And me and my brother were walking around the woods and truly thinking we saw people in mental institution straightjackets running past us.”

That image stuck with Lehane, and a couple of decades later he started thinking about the place, wondering what it would be like if there wasn’t a bridge, if there was a mental institution, and there was maximum security.

“I was doing my research,” he said. “I called the Harbor Island Authority and asked what’s the farthest nautical distance from Boston to one of your islands. And they said there’s one 12 miles out. So I made Shutter 13 miles. That’s inspiration.”